… Continues.
See Quine + Boxer in this journal.
… Continues.
See Quine + Boxer in this journal.
From the AP "Today in History" column for April 12—
On this date:
In 1606, England's King James I decreed the design of the original Union Flag, which combined the flags of England and Scotland.
The 1606 Union Flag incorporated the crosses of St. George (England) and St. Andrew (Scotland).
This suggests some notes on graphic design.
See The Double Cross.
The previous post, "Tesserae for a Tesseract," contains the following
passage from a 1987 review of a book about Finnegans Wake —
"Basically, Mr. Bishop sees the text from above
and as a whole — less as a sequential story than
as a box of pied type or tesserae for a mosaic,
materials for a pattern to be made."
A set of 16 of the Wechsler cubes below are tesserae that
may be used to make patterns in the Galois tesseract.
Another Bellevue story —
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
The title was suggested by the term “psychohistory” in
the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov. See the previous post.
See also a 2010 New York Times review of
DeLillo’s novel Point Omega . The review is titled,
without any other reference to L’Engle’s classic tale
of the same name, “A Wrinkle in Time.”
Related material: The Crosswicks Curse.
Code Blue
Update of 7:04 PM ET —
The source of the 404 message in the browsing history above
was the footnote below:
These are Rothko's Swamps .
See a Log24 search for related meditations.
For all three topics combined, see Coxeter —
" There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question
‘What is truth?’ "
— Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Trudeau’s
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
Update of 10 AM ET — Related material, with an elementary example:
Posts tagged "Defining Form." The example —
"History instructs. History also has
a very dark sense of humor.
Irish history, especially."
— John Kelly in The Daily Beast this morning
See also Joyce's Nightmare and
Nightmare Alley in this journal.
For a black widow —
See history in today's Boston.com
and Waldorf in this journal.
Click the image above for a tweet on the advertised IQ test.
Click the image below for the tweet’s details of the IQ test’s billing plan.
"Truth and clarity remained his paramount goals…"
— Benedict Nightingale in today's online New York TImes on an
English theatre director, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company,
who reportedly died yesterday at 86.
See also Paramount in this journal.
A sentence from the New York Times Wire discussed in the previous post —
"Through characters like Wolverine and Swamp Thing,
he helped bring a new depth to his art form."
For Wolverine and Swamp Thing in posts related to a different
art form — geometry — see …
Paul Krugman:
Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics
In the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov …
“The Prime Radiant can be adjusted to your mind, and all
corrections and additions can be made through mental rapport.
There will be nothing to indicate that the correction or addition
is yours. In all the history of the Plan there has been no
personalization. It is rather a creation of all of us together.
Do you understand?”
“Yes, Speaker!”
— Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation , Ch. 8: Seldon’s Plan
“Before time began, there was the Cube.“
See also Transformers in this journal.
From a search in this journal for Seagram + Tradition —
Related art: Saturday afternoon's Twin Pillars of Symmetry.
The phrase "twin pillars" in a New York Times Fashion & Style
article today suggests a look at another pair of pillars —
This pair, from the realm of memory, history, and geometry disparaged
by the late painter Mark Rothko, might be viewed by Rothko
as "parodies of ideas (which are ghosts)." (See the previous post.)
For a relationship between a 3-dimensional simplex and the {4, 3, 3},
see my note from May 21, 2014, on the tetrahedron and the tesseract.
… Continued from April 11, 2016, and from …
A tribute to Rothko suggested by the previous post —
For the idea of Rothko's obstacles, see Hexagram 39 in this journal.
In memory of an American artist whose work resembles that of
the Soviet constructivist Karl Ioganson (c. 1890-1929).
The American artist reportedly died on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2016.
"In fact, the (re-)discovery of this novel structural principle was made in 1948-49 by a young American artist whom Koleichuk also mentions, Kenneth Snelson. In the summer of 1948, Snelson had gone to study with Joseph Albers who was then teaching at Black Mountain College. . . . One of the first works he made upon his return home was Early X Piece which he dates to December 1948 . . . . "
— "In the Laboratory of Constructivism: |
The word "constructivism" also refers to a philosophy of mathematics.
See a Log24 post, "Constructivist Witness," of 1 AM ET on the above
date of death.
See also, from the above publication date, Hudson's Inscape.
The inscape is illustrated in posts now tagged Laughing Academy.
The title refers to a philosophy of mathematics.
For those who prefer metaphor… Folk Etymology.
See also Stages of Math at Princeton's
Institute for Advanced Study in March 2013 —
— and in this journal starting in August 2014.
The figure below is one approach to the exercise
posted here on December 10, 2016.
Some background from earlier posts —
Click the image below to enlarge it.
Continuing the "Memory, History, Geometry" theme
from yesterday …
See Tetrahedral, Oblivion, and Tetrahedral Oblivion.
"Welcome home, Jack."
“… you don’t write off an aging loved one
just because he or she becomes cranky.”
— Peter Schjeldahl on Rothko in The New Yorker ,
issue dated December 19 & 26, 2016, page 27
He was cranky in his forties too —
See Rothko + Swamp in this journal.
Related attitude —
From Subway Art for Times Square Church , Nov. 7
John Updike on Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis —
" DeLillo’s post-Christian search for 'an order at some deep level'
has brought him to global computerization:
'the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative . . . . ' "
— The New Yorker , issue dated March 31, 2003
On that date ….
Related remark —
" There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question
‘What is truth?’ "
— Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Trudeau’s
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
Images from Burkard Polster's Geometrical Picture Book —
See as well in this journal the large Desargues configuration, with
15 points and 20 lines instead of 10 points and 10 lines as above.
Exercise: Can the large Desargues configuration be formed
by adding 5 points and 10 lines to the above Polster model
of the small configuration in such a way as to preserve
the small-configuration model's striking symmetry?
(Note: The related figure below from May 21, 2014, is not
necessarily very helpful. Try the Wolfram Demonstrations
model, which requires a free player download.)
Labeling the Tetrahedral Model (Click to enlarge) —
Related folk etymology (see point a above) —
Related literature —
The concept of "fire in the center" at The New Yorker ,
issue dated December 12, 2016, on pages 38-39 in the
poem by Marsha de la O titled "A Natural History of Light."
Cézanne's Greetings.
For Autism Sunday —
Mathematician John von Neumann
reportedly died on this date.
“He belonged to that so-called
Hungarian phenomenon….”
— A webpage titled
“Von Neumann, Jewish Catholic”
Illustrations of another Hungarian phenomenon:
(Continued from May 4, 2013)
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain”
“It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses,
Has broken her spell.”
— D. H. Lawrence in a poem on a London blackout
during a bombing raid in 1917. See also today’s previous
posts, Down Under and Howl.
Backstory— Recall, from history’s nightmare on this date,
the Battle of Borodino and the second London Blitz.
Promotional description of a new book:
“Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core— the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences— this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.”
“Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it….”
Or like Metamagical Themas .
Rubik core:
Non- Rubik cores:
Of the odd nxnxn cube: | Of the even nxnxn cube: |
Related material: The Eightfold Cube and…
“A core component in the construction
is a 3-dimensional vector space V over F2 .”
— Page 29 of “A twist in the M24 moonshine story,”
by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland.
(Submitted to the arXiv on 13 Mar 2013.)
Last evening's NY Lottery numbers
985 and 3274, interpreted as the
numbers of Log24 posts, suggest
a look at Joyce's nightmare— history.
* The title refers both to a film and to
a Log24 post, Random Access Memory.
A new Wikipedia page was created on Oct. 9—
"This page was last modified on 9 October 2012 at 19:54."
This, and a long-running musical, suggest…
"Try to remember the kind of September…"
LIFE Magazine for September 6, 1954, provides
one view of the kind of September when I was
twelve years old. (Also that September, Mitt Romney
was seven. President Obama was born later.)
Top of Life Magazine cover, September 6, 1954
This suggests James Joyce's nightmare view of history.
For some other views of 1954, see selected posts in this journal
that mention that year.
See also IMDb on Grace Kelly that year, and a related theological
reflection from Holy Cross Day, 2002.
The title describes two philosophical events (one major, one minor) from the same day— Thursday, July 5, 2007. Some background from 2001:
"Are the finite simple groups, like the prime numbers, jewels strung on an as-yet invisible thread? And will this thread lead us out of the current labyrinthine proof to a radically new proof of the Classification Theorem?" (p. 345)
— Ronald Solomon, "A Brief History of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , Vol. 38 No. 3 (July 2001), pp. 315-352
The major event— On July 5, 2007, Cambridge University Press published Robert T. Curtis's Symmetric Generation of Groups.*
Curtis's book does not purport to lead us out of Solomon's labyrinth, but its publication date may furnish a Jungian synchronistic clue to help in exiting another nightmare labyrinth— that of postmodernist nominalism.
The minor event— The posting of Their Name is Legion in this journal on July 5, 2007.
* This is the date given by Amazon.co.uk and by BookDepository.com. Other sources give a later July date, perhaps applicable to the book's publication in the U.S. rather than Britain.
(Continued from Abel Prize, August 26)
The situation is rather different when the
underlying Galois field has two rather than
three elements… See Galois Geometry.
The coffee scene from “Bleu”
Related material from this journal:
The Dream of
the Expanded Field
Philosophy versus Stories —
The above uploading was done on December 10th, 2006.
For some context, see the Log24 posts for December 2006.
See also the German version of a nursery rhyme
that one commenter has called "morbid and horrifying"—
"Dein Vater sitzt auf der Schwelle:
Flieg in Himmel aus der Hölle."
The rhyme suggests characters in the novel The Quest for the 36
related to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire often recalled during
women's history month. It also suggests the oeuvre of Stephen King.
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
– Ulysses
Joyce’s Nightmare
continues
Today in History – March 2Today is Monday, March 2, the 61st day of 2009. There are 304 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On March 2, 1939, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope on his 63rd birthday; he took the name Pius XII. |
From Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563: “He brings out the mandala he found. Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night….”
In lieu of Slothrop’s mandala, here is another… Christ and the Four Elements This 1495 image is found in
For further details,
click on any of the three mandalas above. |
Happy birthday to
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.
“History, Stephen said,
is a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake.”
— Ulysses
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? — Ulysses, conclusion of Chapter 17 |
His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society…. He purred a chuckle. “My place. If you want to come, I’ll show you.” “Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?” “That’s what the locals call it. It’s really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole.” — Psychoshop, byAlfred Bester and Roger Zelazny |
In memory of
special effects wizard
Stan Winston,
who died Sunday at 62:
“The energetic Winston
was always looking
to the next project.”
— Today’s LA Times,
story by
Dennis McLellan
Hermann Hesse’s 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
“For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar’s Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors.”
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
“Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O’s Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is “free.” Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn’t visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe’s color wheel and in Alfred Jensen’s use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn’t bother with the poet’s meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page.”
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale “block design” subtest. |
ZZ Figures from the ![]() Zahlen und Zeichen, Wörter und Worte Mit Zeichen und Zahlen Numbers and Names, With numbers and names English translation by Catherine Schelbert Alphabets From time to time But if a savage — Hermann Hesse (1943), |
Obituaries in the News
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:13 a.m. ET
Norman Hackerman
“AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Norman Hackerman, a chemist … died Saturday [June 16] …. He was 95. … He taught chemistry … before joining the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II.”
The date of Hackerman’s death is celebrated in Ireland as Bloomsday— the day on which, in 1904, the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses came to pass.
Scene from
“Behind the Lid” —
Photo by Richard Termine
Those who like such scenes may consult past Log24 entries. They will find, for instance, the following, commemorating a death which, like Hackerman’s, occurred on a Bloomsday:
Click on the picture for details.
“History, Stephen said,
is a nightmare
from which I am
trying to awake.”
— Ulysses
A rectangle in memory of
Harvard mathematician
George Mackey:
The five Log24 entries ending at
7:00 PM on March 14, 2006,
the last day of Mackey's life:
A rectangle in memory of
artist Mark Rothko:
Sotheby's
Rothko Painting
By CAROL VOGEL of
THE NEW YORK TIMES,
"David Rockefeller plans to sell
a seminal painting by Mark Rothko
for what Sotheby's hopes will be
more than $40 million. Above,
a detail from the painting."
From the story:
"Mr. Rockefeller has owned the
painting since 1960, when he
bought it for less than $10,000….
He said that in November, during a
periodic appraisal of his art collection,
he noticed to his surprise that of all
his paintings, the Rothko had
appreciated in value the most.
'That got me thinking,' he said."
Art appreciation:
When Crayolas worked, I dreamed an angel, a bar of light, your messenger, beckoning from a wallpaper corner, blushing in the porcelain gas glow.
When Crayolas worked and chariots swung low,
Then all that died in life's longer year.
Still you were there, shining and warm
in another fair spring to live again
— Excerpt from C. K. Latham's |
The next novel starring
Robert Langdon, Harvard author
of "the renowned collegiate
texbook Religious Iconology"
is said to be titled
The Solomon Key.
Related material–
The Harvard Crimson online:
Fishburne To Receive Honors at Cultural Rhythms Acclaimed actor and humanitarian chosen as the Harvard Foundation's Artist of the Year By DORIS A. HERNANDEZ Friday, February 16, 2007 9:37 PM Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Laurence Fishburne will take the stage later this month as the 2007 Artist of the Year during the 22nd annual Cultural Rhythms festival, the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations announced Friday afternoon. |
Fishburne
as Morpheus
"Metaphor for Morphean morphosis,
Dreams that wake, transform, and die,
Calm and lucid this psychosis,
Joyce's nightmare in Escher's eye….
Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore
Ripples spread from castle rock. The metaphor
For metamorphosis no keys unlock."
— Steven H. Cullinane,
November 7, 1986,
"Endgame"
More on metamorphosis–
Cat's Yarn
(Log24, June 20, 2006):
"The end is where
we start from."
plus.maths.org
and
Garfield 2003-06-24
See also:
Zen Koan
and
Blue Dream.
Update of 5:24 PM
Feb. 18, 2007:
A Xanga footprint from France
this afternoon (3:47 PM EST)
indicates that someone there
may be interested in the above
poem's "claves regni caelorum."
The visitor from France viewed
"Windmills" (Nov. 15, 2005).
Material related to that entry
may be found in various places
at Log24.com. See particularly
"Shine On, Hermann Weyl," and
entries for Women's History
Month last year that include
"Christ at the Lapin Agile."
History
From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press–
On this date (July 30):
“In 1864, during the Civil War, Union forces tried to take Petersburg, Va., by exploding a mine under Confederate defense lines; the attack failed.”
“A nightmare” — Ulysses
See also July 3, 2005.
Ineluctable
On the poetry of Geoffrey Hill:
"… why read him? Because of the things he writes about—war and peace and sacrifice, and the search for meaning and the truths of the heart, and for that haunting sense that, in spite of war and terror and the indifferences that make up our daily hells, there really is some grander reality, some ineluctable presence we keep touching. There remains in Hill the daunting possibility that it may actually all cohere in the end, or at least enough of it to keep us searching for more.
There is a hard edge to Hill, a strong Calvinist streak in him, and an intelligence that reminds one of Milton….."
— Paul Mariani, review in America of Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon
"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
"A very short space of time through very short times of space…. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
— James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter
"Time has been unfolded into space."
"Pattern and symmetry are closely related."
— James O. Coplien on Symmetry Breaking
"… as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts it, 'the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time . . . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking his self among its temporal manifestations'….
— Goldberg, S.L. 'Homer and the Nightmare of History.' Modern Critical Views: James Joyce. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-38."
— from the Choate site of David M. Loeb
![]() Joyce |
(By the way, Jorn Barger seems
to have emerged from seclusion.)
Minimalism
"It's become our form of modern classicism."
— Nancy Spector in
the New York Times of April 23, 2004
Part I: Aesthetics
In honor of the current Guggenheim exhibition, "Singular Forms" — A quotation from the Guggenheim's own website:
"Minimalism refers to painting or sculpture
Discuss these seven points
in relation to the following:
Form,
by S. H. Cullinane
Mark Rothko's reference
to geometry as a "swamp"
and his talk of "the idea" in art
Michael Kimmelman's
remarks on ideas in art
ART WARS:
Judgment Day
(2003, 10/07)
Part II: Theology
Today's previous entry, "Skylark," concluded with an invocation of the Lord. Of course, the Lord one expects may not be the Lord that appears.
"… the idea that, in art at least, less is more.
It is an idea surely as old, as enduringly attractive and as ubiquitous as its opposite. In the beginning was the Word: only later came the Bible, not to mention the three-decker Victorian novel. The oracle at Delphi did not say, 'Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of one's own psyche may be prerequisite to an understanding of one's behavior and of the world at large'; it said, 'Know thyself.' Such inherently minimalist genres as oracles (from the Delphic shrine of Apollo to the modern fortune cookie), proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, epigrams, pensees, mottoes, slogans and quips are popular in every human century and culture–especially in oral cultures and subcultures, where mnemonic staying power has high priority–and many specimens of them are self-reflexive or self-demonstrative: minimalism about minimalism. 'Brevity is the soul of wit.' "
Another form of the oracle at Delphi, in minimalist prose that might make Hemingway proud:
"He would think about Bert. Bert was an interesting man. Bert had said something about the way a gambler wants to lose. That did not make sense. Anyway, he did not want to think about it. It was dark now, but the air was still hot. He realized that he was sweating, forced himself to slow down the walking. Some children were playing a game with a ball, in the street, hitting it against the side of a building. He wanted to see Sarah.
When he came in, she was reading a book, a tumbler of dark whiskey beside her on the end table. She did not seem to see him and he sat down before he spoke, looking at her and, at first, hardly seeing her. The room was hot; she had opened the windows, but the air was still. The street noises from outside seemed almost to be in the room with them, as if the shifting of gears were being done in the closet, the children playing in the bathroom. The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she was reading.
He looked at her face. She was very drunk. Her eyes were swollen, pink at the corners. 'What's the book,' he said, trying to make his voice conversational. But it sounded loud in the room, and hard.
She blinked up at him, smiled sleepily, and said nothing.
'What's the book?' His voice had an edge now.
'Oh,' she said. 'It's Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard.' She pushed her legs out straight on the couch, stretching her feet. Her skirt fell back a few inches from her knees. He looked away.
'What's that?' he said.
'Well, I don't exactly know, myself." Her voice was soft and thick.
He turned his face away from her again, not knowing what he was angry with. 'What does that mean, you don't know, yourself?'
She blinked at him. 'It means, Eddie, that I don't exactly know what the book is about. Somebody told me to read it once, and that's what I'm doing. Reading it.'
He looked at her, tried to grin at her — the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everbody like him — but he could not. 'That's great,' he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.
She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. She folded her arms around her, hugging herself, smiling at him. 'I guess this isn't your night, Eddie. Why don't we have a drink?'
'No.' He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.
Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. 'Then let's talk about something else,' she said. 'What about that case you have? What's in it?' Her voice was not prying, only friendly, 'Pencils?'
'That's it,' he said. 'Pencils.'
She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. 'What's in it, Eddie?'
'Figure it out yourself.' He tossed the case on the couch."
— Walter Tevis, The Hustler, 1959,
Chapter 11
See, too, the invocation of Apollo in
A Mass for Lucero, as well as
GENERAL AUDIENCE OF JOHN PAUL II
Wednesday 15 January 2003:
"The invocation of the Lord is relentless…."
and
JOURNAL ENTRY OF S. H. CULLINANE
Wednesday 15 January 2003:
Karl Cullinane —
"I will fear no evil, for I am the
meanest son of a bitch in the valley."
Cartesian Theatre
From aldaily.com today:
"If my mind is a tiny theatre I watch in my brain, then there is a tinier mind and theatre inside that mind to see it, and so on forever… more»"
This leads to the dream (or nightmare) of the Cartesian theatre, as pictured by Daniel Dennett.
From websurfing yesterday and today…
The tiny theatre of Ivor Grattan-Guinness:
The contempt for history of the Harvard mathematics department (see previous entry) suggests a phrase….
A search on "Harvard sneer" yields, as the first page found, a memorial to an expert practitioner of the Harvard sneer… Robert Harris Chapman, Professor of English Literature, playwright, theatrical consultant, and founding Director of the Loeb Drama Center from 1960 to 1980.
Continuing the Grattan-Guinness rainbow theme in a tinier theatre, we may picture Chapman's reaction to the current Irish Repertory Theatre production of Finian's Rainbow. Let us hope it is not a Harvard sneer.
In a yet tinier theatre, we may envision a mathematical version of Finian's Rainbow, with Og the leprechaun played by Andrew P. Ogg. Ogg would, of course, perform a musical version of his remarks on the Jugendtraum:
"Follow the fellow who follows a dream."
Melissa Errico
in Finian's Rainbow
"Give her a song like…. 'Look to the Rainbow,' and her gleaming soprano effortlessly flies it into the stratosphere where such numbers belong. This is the voice of enchantment…."
— Ben Brantley, today's NY Times
For related philosophical remarks on rainbows, infinite regress, and redheads, see
For Fred Sandback:
Time's a Round
The following entry of Feb. 25, 2003, was written for painter Mark Rothko, and may serve as well for minimalist artist Fred Sandback, also connected to the de Menil family of art patrons, who, like Rothko, has killed himself.
Plagued in life by depression — what Styron, quoting Milton, called "darkness visible" — Rothko took his own life on this date [Feb. 25] in 1970. As a sequel to the previous note, "Song of Not-Self," here are the more cheerful thoughts of the song "Time's a Round," the first of Shiva Dancing: The Rothko Chapel Songs, by C. K. Latham. See also my comment on the previous entry (7:59 PM).
Time’s a round, time’s a round, — C. K. Latham
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The following is from the cover of
"Finnegans Wake: a Symposium,"
a reprint of
Our Exagmination Round His Factification
for Incamination of Work in Progress,
Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929.
As well as being a memorial to Rothko and Sandback, the above picture may serve to mark the diamond anniversary of a dinner party at Shakespeare and Company on this date in 1928. (See previous entry.)
A quotation from aaparis.org also seems relevant on this, the date usually given for the death of author Malcolm Lowry, in some of whose footsteps I have walked:
"We are not saints."
— Chapter V, Alcoholics Anonymous
ART WARS:
Geometry for Jews
Today is Michelangelo's birthday.
Those who prefer the Sistine Chapel to the Rothko Chapel may invite their Jewish friends to answer the following essay question:
Discuss the geometry underlying the above picture. How is this geometry related to the work of Jewish artist Sol LeWitt? How is it related to the work of Aryan artist Ernst Witt? How is it related to the Griess "Monster" sporadic simple group whose elements number
808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000?
Some background:
From Nobel Prize Women in Science, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Second Edition (2001), Joseph Henry Press:
"Storm trooper Ernst Witt, resplendent in the Brownshirt uniform of Hitler's paramilitary, knocked on a Jew's apartment door in 1934. A short, rotund woman opened the door. Emmy Noether smiled, welcomed the young Nazi into her home, and started her underground math class. The Brownshirt was one of her favorite pupils."
On this date in 1962, Frank Sinatra recorded "I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues" for Capitol Records. This was his last recording for Capitol. He had already started recording for Reprise Records.
Related reading:
For Mark Rothko
Plagued in life by depression — what Styron, quoting Milton, called "darkness visible" — Rothko took his own life on this date in 1970. As a sequel to the previous note, "Song of Not-Self," here are the more cheerful thoughts of the song "Time's a Round," the first of Shiva Dancing: The Rothko Chapel Songs, by C. K. Latham. See also my comment on the previous entry (7:59 PM).
Time’s a round, time’s a round,
A circle, you see, a circle to be.
— C. K. Latham
Song of Not-Self
A critic on the abstract expressionists:
"…they painted that reality — that song of self — with a passion, bravura, and decisiveness unequaled in modern art."
Painter Mark Rothko:
"I don't express myself in painting.
I express my not-self."
On this day in 1957, Buddy Holly and his group recorded the hit version of "That'll Be the Day."
On this day in 1970, painter Mark Rothko committed suicide in his New York City studio.
On February 27, 1971, the Rothko Chapel was formally dedicated in Houston, Texas.
On May 26, 1971, Don McLean recorded "American Pie."
Rothko was apparently an alcoholic; whether he spent his last day enacting McLean's lyrics I do not know.
Rothko is said to have written that
"The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood."
— Mark Rothko, The Tiger's Eye, 1, no. 9 (October 1949), p. 114
Whether Holly's concept "the day that I die" is a mere parody of an idea or "an idea in itself," the reader may judge. The reader may also judge the wisdom of building a chapel to illustrate the clarity of thought processes such as Rothko's in 1949. I personally feel that someone who can call geometry a "swamp" may not be the best guide to religious meditation.
For another view, see this essay by Erik Anderson Reece.
Mass Confusion
From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:
“It’s the birthday of [novelist] John le Carré, born David John Moore Cornwell, in Poole, England (1931)…. His father was a con artist who wanted his two sons to be lawyers because he thought it would come in handy. He sent them to boarding school, where they learned to speak and act like members of the British upper-class, but when they went home they knew they might have to bail him out of jail, or spend the holidays with a bunch of crooks. He learned German and became a spy, but said he ‘never did anything to alter the world order.'”
From The New York Times of Oct. 19, 2002:
“…victims of sexually abusive priests expressed despair and outrage yesterday at the Vatican’s refusal to endorse the American bishops’ zero tolerance policy….
‘This certainly sends the whole thing into wild confusion,’ said Thomas C. Fox, publisher of The National Catholic Reporter, an independent newsweekly that helped uncover the church’s sexual abuse problem nearly two decades ago. ‘It seems we haven’t moved anywhere in finding a resolution, and that makes it terribly, terribly painful. It’s like this nightmare simply won’t end.'”
Other classic Catholic quotations…
1. “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
2. “What is truth?”
3. “Writers often cry ‘Truth! Truth at all costs!’ Some are sincere. Others are hypocrites. They use the truth, distort it, exploit it, for an ulterior purpose. Let us consider the case of John Cornwell….” — Inside the Vatican
John Cornwell recently wrote a classic study of the Roman Catholic Church, Hitler’s Pope* (Viking Press, October 1999).
According to the Daily Catholic and to Inside the Vatican, Cornwell is the brother of of spy novelist John le Carré (born David Cornwell). An article in the Jerusalem Post, however, seems to say that the spy novelist had only one brother, whose name was in fact Tony, not John. A Sydney Morning Herald article confirms this version of the Cornwell family history. Finally, once one learns from the Sydney article that David Cornwell’s father’s name was Ronnie, a perfected Google search reveals a Literary Encyclopedia article that seems to demonstrate conclusively that the Roman Catholic sources cited above lied about John Cornwell’s family background. Of course, this may be wrong… Those who wish may investigate further.
* (I personally prefer Hitler’s own remarks on the Church’s “static pole,” but tastes differ.)
"History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake"
— James Joyce in Ulysses
"Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out."
— Hugh Latimer, former Bishop of Worcester, to his friend Nicholas Ridley, former private chaplain to Henry VIII, on the occasion of their being burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic queen Bloody Mary Tudor on October 16, 1555
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